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Monthly Archives: February 2008

Oil and Anger

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Sometimes an intersection of possibilities comes along for teaching a lesson, and this one has dredged up a lot of painful memories for me. There was a hearing today in the US Supreme Court about whether Exxon should have to pay punitive damages for the Valdez oil spill in 1989, nearly 20 years ago. I [...]

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The Right Way to Teach

Friday, February 22, 2008

This little bit of personal history is inspired by Alice Mercer’s post about scripted reading instruction, which sounds to me like a relatively simple way for school districts to train teaching personnel instead of promoting real professional learning opportunities. I like Alice’s recommendation: “Be clear in what the program is doing, what you are doing, [...]

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Progress

Monday, February 11, 2008

You take the good with the bad. Most notably, it’s been cold. Even for the Alaska interior, the birthplace of cold, it’s been cold. It’s was minus 30 to minus 45 degrees for a week until yesterday, when it warmed up to zero for a while. It was -72 in Chicken. Really, there’s a place [...]

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On Reading Skills and Strategies

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Skills is a word that gets a regular workout in discussions about education. I used it in my previous post about reading instruction, making a distinction between skills and strategies. I listed what I saw as examples of each in order to amplify this statement: “Good assessment techniques provide information about the skills and strategies [...]

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Reading Teacher Mojo

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Since I may be one of the “smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks” Garrison Keillor mentioned in his wrongheaded critique of reading teachers, I’ll go along with Ken Goodman, who says, “NCLB is not about reforming schools. It’s about making public education look like a failed ideal.” Rather than dwell on that discussion, though, we should talk [...]

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